The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has confirmed the mysterious object that crashed in North Carolina

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Recently, NASA confirmed that a charred metal plate found in the North Carolina forest was a fragment of the cargo module of the Crew Dragon spacecraft, which had fallen from space and caused no damage or casualties.

What's going on?

NASA relies heavily on missions from private companies, and experts explain that it was supposed to be a manned spacecraft that fell from space while flying to the International Space Station.

Could it be that NASA has other plans?

In order to make space missions more efficient, NASA needs to make space vehicles reusable, so why does this need to be dropped from space even when it is a spacecraft?

Recycling of the Crew Dragon spacecraft.

At first, the first manned spacecraft was the unmanned "Dongfanghong 1", which was a manned mission to space carried out by the Soviet Union in 1961.

Yuri Gagarin, a cosmonaut on the mission, lifted himself to an orbital altitude of about 400 kilometers above sea level, and he could see the stars in the night sky in the shade and the sun shining on the earth.

On this space mission, he stayed in space for nearly an hour and a half, and after that, countries around the world began to carry out space exploration missions.

At that time, the international community, the United States and the Soviet Union were still fighting for space exploration, following the successful launch of "Dongfanghong 1" into space, and soon after, in 1961, the American astronaut Shepard also achieved the first manned flight mission into space, which was a manned mission carried out by "Freedom".

Since then, both the United States and the Soviet Union have developed a series of spacecraft and launchers for space exploration missions.

One of them is the single-use space shuttle.

This kind of aircraft is difficult to manufacture, and the requirements for the technical level are also very high, and the service life is not very long, and the cost of use is also the largest, because this kind of aircraft can only be used once, which is very unfavorable for the flight project.

In 2011, the Space Shuttle program was halted, and since then, human exploration and flight into outer space have also been greatly affected.

In January 2012, NASA officially announced that it would reissue a manned mission into space, and the new manned vehicle is more advanced, its main goal is to achieve multiple reuse, the space vehicle is mainly developed by Texas "SpaceX", and in May 2014, SpaceX successfully completed the test flight for the manned mission.

In 2017, SpaceX officially launched a manned vehicle to the International Space Station, driving this vehicle to shuttle back and forth between the rocket and the International Space Station, sending laboratory equipment and other materials on the International Space Station to the International Space Station, and then sending the experimental materials and other equipment on the International Space Station back to Earth from space.

The Crew Dragon spacecraft is currently being studied to meet a range of NASA needs, but Dragon Spacecraft aims to build the number of such spacecraft, and according to NASA's plan, the Crew Dragon spacecraft will need to be tested 15 times.

During these 15 flight tests, after being certified and audited by the Federal Space Agency, SpaceX needs to build a total of four manned spacecraft.

Therefore, the research of such a spacecraft to achieve a multi-flight cycle is to be the best in the competition.

After this period of research and development, SpaceX has built a four-dose Crew Dragon spacecraft, while the company is still insisting on developing a fifth manned spacecraft, and the test flight of the fifth is expected to be in 2025.

The mission of the Crew Dragon spacecraft.

At the beginning of this year, a Crew Dragon spacecraft sent astronauts to the International Space Station, an internationally jointly built space station and a gravity-free laboratory.

The experimental equipment is mainly about aerospace medicine, physics, accelerated experiments and plant growth, etc., and it is also the site of international joint space scientific experiments, and astronauts from the United States, Russia, Japan, the European Space Agency and other countries will come here to conduct a series of scientific research experiments.

It takes about two days to travel to a spacecraft on the International Space Station, and the spacecraft travel time between the two places is about six months, during which the space goes through a solar cycle, which is between the rising and setting of the sun.

And during this time, this spacecraft is not able to communicate effectively with people on Earth.

As a result, astronauts spend more time on spacecraft, which will expend more effort on scientific research.

In March of this year, a Crew Dragon spacecraft sent two astronauts to the International Space Station.

The two astronauts are two astronauts selected by NASA and are also two veterans.

One is an American astronaut who flew to the International Space Station on the Crew Dragon spacecraft, and he had signed four missions with SpaceX, and this mission was the second of the space missions, and he was placed after the mission carried out by Yuri Gagarinon.

The other cosmonaut is a Russian cosmonaut who spent more than a year on the International Space Station.

Problems caused by space junk.

From space, it can be seen as an endless ocean, so how to deal with the garbage in space?

Space junk, like the garbage on Earth, is very large and dangerous, and people will die because of it.

At present, according to a statistical report by NASA, there are about 23,000 pieces of garbage larger than 10 centimeters in the universe, and the amount of garbage larger than 1 centimeter is about 530,000, and the number of garbage of 0.1 meters is staggering as high as millions.

The debris materials in the garbage mercilessly shuttle through the universe, crashing into the spacecraft as they move, thus forming a series of collision and destruction phenomena.

Some materials, such as debris and fine debris materials, will affect the spacecraft, and the same is true for the Crew Dragon spacecraft, which will also be affected by garbage and produce a series of failures.

Therefore, NASA researchers have begun to study the problem of garbage in space, and are currently developing a space equipment robot.

Under their control, the robot is able to pick up space junk and bring it back to Earth for research, allowing it to better dispose of underwater waste.

However, such a research and development project is only a conceptual concept, if you want to complete this task, you need to develop a robot that can completely adapt to the situation, freely control the direction, and at the same time be able to capture the location of the garbage in an instant, but at present, the mainland is still on the way to this technical research, and it is still a long way from realization.

It's still promising.

After all, the mainland is constantly innovating and developing in many scientific fields.

At the time of the mysterious object incident, NASA and SpaceX both said that it was just a simple accident, and there were no casualties, so people should not worry too much about this, after all, people's exploration of space is always risky, there will be many thorny problems, and there are many challenges waiting for us to overcome, and the development of science and technology is for our future to build better.

epilogue

With the continuous improvement of the development of the Manned Dragon spacecraft, the mainland's aerospace industry will also conduct more in-depth research in this area in the future.

The door of space exploration has been opened for us, waiting for us to conquer, although the road is long, but as long as we have faith, we will continue to walk, in search of a wider and infinite sea.